This book shares insights into the various ways technology can be used for educational purposes, utilizing an approach suitable for both novice and advanced practitioners in this niche area. It features selected papers presented at the International Conference on e-Learning 2015 (ICeL 2015), where professionals discussed how technology can not only serve as a tool in the classroom, but as the classroom itself. As the title “Envisioning the Future of Online Learning” suggests, this book showcases current best practices in the field of e-learning, where technology has been leveraged to re-engineer the landscape of education, particularly in the context of Malaysia.

Demand for quality higher education, is continuing to outpace the supply due to growing population of young people, gains in school education, growing middle class and their rising aspirations. At the same time, the country has a unique opportunity to convert this demographic surplus to its economic strength by providing its young people the right kind of skills. Thus, higher education now occupies a central position in the country's strategy for global competitiveness and inclusive growth. Steps have been initiated to augment supply, improve quality and fix problems. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) has made several useful and important recommendations and the government has significantly increased funding during the Eleventh Five Year Plan. In the backdrop of these developments, Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future, describes the Indian higher education landscape. The author spells out the needs, identifies the gaps, and based on the lessons learnt from the experiences of other countries provides perspectives to shape its future.

This edited collection invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on - and craft visions for - the future of environmental and sustainability education. It explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today. Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. 'Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education' builds on this earlier work - as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.

Offering a broad overview of consequential changes in the landscape of reference services, this guide also provides practical guidance on how to meet the new challenges they present. For the past decade, librarians have been lamenting the demise of reference services. Encouraging recent research shows that reference librarians are actually in more demand than ever; however, nearly everything about reference has changed—from technologies, tools, and techniques to models of service. What are these changes, and how can the profession respond to and prepare for shifting priorities and user needs? In this volume, business librarians Diane Zabel and Lauren Reiter bring together a host of experts to answer these timely questions. Topics range from the education and training of professionals to meeting the needs and wants of employers. Covered are trends in chat reference, research consultations, do-it-yourself reference, tracking trends with user populations, assessment, and data-driven decisions about reference services. Grounded in the principle that, regardless of the evolutions in service, the user remains at the center of reference, this guide offers readers an exciting look at the future of this important public service.

Edited by a thought leader with an international reputation, it brings together renowned authors from across the globe who are breaking traditional moulds and boundaries in a way that will have a profound impact on the way libraries and library services are conceptualized in the years to come. They represent the key links in the knowledge chain: authors, publishers, academics, community knowledge creators, librarians and institutions; the student perspective is also provided.

This book discusses the development of the next generation learning spaces with emerging technologies. These spaces result from the combined needs of classroom stakeholders, such as instructors and learners, with classroom elements, such as tools and technologies, pedagogy and content. The book presents discussions and studies on issues, possibilities and implications of these changes for next generation education. Novel ideas, and studies on these all-encompassing, blended roles of technologies in next generation learning spaces are clearly presented. Suggestions on how the benefits they offer can be maximized are also discussed. Engaging learning technologies have remained central in education for assisting instructors to teach and learners to learn, more effectively. However, recent technological growth is creating a system in which previous divides between key classroom concepts and stakeholders are getting progressively blurred. This is giving rise to next generation learning spaces where elements and stakeholders are blended into one. The book addresses the future of learning environments based on these perspectives.